Memeorandum

February 28, 2011

The First Phonies have their personal trainer fly in from Chi-town once a week? Good grief - the next time Michelle is going on about locally grown food, just shoot me. Better yet, fly in from a distant city to shoot me. No, fly me to an exotic locale and shoot me there... ahh, forget it.

(CBS) Cornell McClellan can boast that he's got about the biggest celebrities you can as clients - the first couple.

McClellan, a personal trainer who owns a gym called Naturally Fit in President and Michelle Obamas' hometown of Chicago, is still helping them keep in shape - he flies to Washington about once a week, mostly to work with the first lady, but sometimes Mr. Obama, as well.

February 27, 2011

MALMO, Sweden — Nick Nilsson, 46, decided to vote for Sweden’s far-right party last fall because of a growing sense that his country had gone too far in letting so many immigrants settle here.

A truck driver, Mr. Nilsson lives a half mile from the Rosengard section of this city, where dreary apartment buildings are jammed with refugees from virtually all the world’s recent conflicts: Iranians, Bosnians, Palestinians, Somalis, Iraqis.

“No one has a job over there,” Mr. Nilsson said recently. “They are shooting at each other. There are drugs. They burn cars. Enough is enough.”

For a time, Sweden seemed immune to the kind of anti-immigrant sentiment blossoming elsewhere on the European continent. Its generous welfare and asylum policies have allowed hundreds of thousands of refugees to settle here, many in recent years from Muslim countries. Nearly a quarter of Sweden’s population is now foreign born or has a foreign-born parent.

But increasingly, Swedes are questioning these policies. Last fall, the far-right party — campaigning largely on an anti-immigration theme — won 6 percent of the vote and, for the first time, enough support to be seated in the Swedish Parliament.

Six months later, many Swedes are still in shock. The country — proud of its reputation for tolerance — can no longer say it stands apart from the growing anti-immigrant sentiment that has changed European parliaments elsewhere, leading to the banning of burqas in France and minarets in Switzerland.

February 26, 2011

Shorter Paul Krugman: Public sector workers are underpaid in Texas and Georgia, so therefore thy can't possibly be overpaid in Wisconsin or New Jersey.

Hmm, that sounds even dumber than I first imagined put that way, yet here is the Earnest Prof citing national studies and national averages as though that adresses the issue in particular states:

Public sector workers are not, on average, grossly overpaid compared with the private sector — period. You can fiddle at the edges of this conclusion, but it’s just not possible to conclude, based on any honest assessment of the data, that schoolteachers are the new welfare queens.

The clearest pattern to emerge is an educational divide: workers without college degrees tend to do better on state payrolls, while workers with college degrees tend to do worse. That divide has grown more pronounced in recent decades. Since 1990, the median wage of state workers without college degrees has come to surpass that of workers in the private sector. During the same period, though, college-educated state workers have seen their median pay lag further behind their peers in the private sector.

The census data analyzed by The Times do not include information on pensions and other benefits, which is crucial for a fuller comparison because public sector workers typically receive more in benefits than workers in the private sector do.

...

When workers are divided into two groups — those with bachelor’s degrees and higher and those without — a very different pattern emerges. State workers with college degrees earn less, often substantially less, than private sector workers with the same education in all but three states — Montana, Nevada and Wyoming.

Less educated workers on state payrolls, however, tend to do better than their counterparts in the private sector. The median wages of state workers without bachelor’s degrees are higher than those in the private sector in 30 states. California, New York, Connecticut and Nevada lead the way, each paying workers without degrees at least 25 percent more than the private sector pays those workers.

Certain states, however, are clearly more generous than others, at least relative to the private sector. California, Iowa, Nevada, New York and Rhode Island are at the upper end of the spectrum for both college-educated workers and those without college degrees.

Meanwhile, others states, like Kansas, Missouri, New Hampshire, Tennessee and Texas, are much more frugal with both groups.

The disparity can be attributed to a number of factors: the power of unions in different states, the strength of the private sector, local political traditions, education levels.

In Wisconsin, for instance, where Governor Walker, a Republican, is trying to sharply curtail collective-bargaining rights and to limit yearly raises for state workers to no more than the Consumer Price Index, the median wage for state workers exceeds that of the private sector by 22 percent. But more than 60 percent of state workers are college educated.

Per their chart, high school grads on the Wisconsin payroll earn 11.3% more than their private sector counterparts, without counting benefits. Down in Texas, the high school grads lag by 5.6%. Dare we note that the current controversy is in Wisconsin, not Texas?

Hitch suggests the President is secretly Swiss, and is simply waiting to gauge the strenght of the prevailing winds:

The Obama administration also behaves as if the weight of the United States in world affairs is approximately the same as that of Switzerland. We await developments. We urge caution, even restraint. We hope for the formation of an international consensus. And, just as there is something despicable about the way in which Swiss bankers change horses, so there is something contemptible about the way in which Washington has been affecting—and perhaps helping to bring about—American impotence.

Mr. Wieseltier puts it more politiely than I would in suggesting that Obama simply hates American power almost as much as the sterotypical third-worlder:

Why is Obama so disinclined to use the power at his disposal? His diffidence about humanitarian emergencies is one of the most mystifying features of his presidency, and one of its salient characteristics. These crises—in Tehran two years ago, in Cairo last month, in Tripoli now—produce in him a lame sort of lawyerliness. He lists the relevant rights and principles and then turns to procedural questions, like those consultations. The official alibi for Obama’s patience with Qaddafi’s atrocity is his concern for the Americans who are still stranded within Qaddafi’s reach; I was amused to learn from a friend that the spin out of the White House includes the suggestion that Obama’s restraint is actually the wisdom of the hostage negotiator. But Obama’s statement about Libya suggests another explanation for his slow pace. This was its climax: “So let me be clear. The change that is taking place across the region is being driven by the people of the region. This change doesn’t represent the work of the United States or any foreign power. It represents the aspirations of people who are seeking a better life.”

They are fighting authoritarianism, but he is fighting imperialism. Who in their right mind believes that this change does represent the work of the United States or any foreign power? To be sure, there are conspiracy theorists in the region who are not in their right mind, and will hold such an anti-American view; but this anti-Americanism is not an empirical matter. They will hate us whatever we do. I do not see a Middle East rising up in anger at the prospect of American intervention. I see an American president with a paralyzing fear that it will.

Of course, this is the same President who has tripled our troop commitment to Afghanistan.

AllahPundit has a deeper and darker theory - whatever the US does now may set a precedent for our response to an uprising in Saudi Arabia. Interesting...

February 25, 2011

SecDef Gates thinks the folly of the US engaging in a land war in Asia has finally sunk in:

WEST POINT, NY — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates bluntly told an audience of West Point cadets on Friday that it would be unwise for the United States to ever fight another war like Iraq or Afghanistan, and that the chances of carrying out a change of regime in that fashion again are slim.

“In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it,” Mr. Gates told an assembly of Army cadets here.

Hmm - Afghanistan is not exactly in the past tense in terms of decision making.

Mr. Gates also has an interesting concern about the future career parh of our currently highly-experienced officer corps:

A decade of constant conflict has trained a junior officer corps with exceptional leadership skills, he told the cadets, but the Army may find it difficult in the future to find inspiring work to retain its rising commanders as it fights for the money to keep large, heavy combat units in the field.

“Men and women in the prime of their professional lives, who may have been responsible for the lives of scores or hundreds of troops, or millions of dollars in assistance, or engaging or reconciling warring tribes, may find themselves in a cube all day re-formatting PowerPoint slides, preparing quarterly training briefs, or assigned an ever-expanding array of clerical duties,” Mr. Gates said. “The consequences of this terrify me.”

How do you keep 'em down in the cubicle after they seen Kabul? One might worry that our military will have an unusually high bias for action.

Mr. West is a Vietnam veteran who served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs under Reagan. He also authored an award-winning book about Iraq, The March Up: Taking Baghdad with the United States Marines. As Mr. Filkins notes, "West is no antiwar lefty". However, his outlook for the US effort in Afghanistan is bleak:

West shows in the most granular, detailed way how and why America’s counterinsurgency in Afghanistan is failing. And, in the places where the effort is showing promise, he demonstrates why we don’t have the resources to duplicate that success on a wider scale...

West joined American troops in Garmsir, Marja and Nawa in Helmand Province; Barge Matal in Nuristan; and the Korengal Valley in Kunar — all in the heart of the fight. His basic argument can be summed up like this: American soldiers and Marines are very good at counterinsurgency, and they are breaking their hearts, and losing their lives, doing it so hard. But the central premise of counterinsurgency doctrine holds that if the Americans sacrifice on behalf of the Afghan government, then the Afghan people will risk their lives for that same government in return. They will fight the Taliban, finger the informants hiding among them and transform themselves into authentic leaders who spurn death and temptation.

This isn’t happening. What we have created instead, West shows, is a vast culture of dependency: Americans are fighting and dying, while the Afghans by and large stand by and do nothing to help them. Afghanistan’s leaders, from the presidential palace in Kabul to the river valleys in the Pashtun heartland, are enriching themselves, often criminally, on America’s largesse. The Taliban, whatever else they do, fight hard and for very little reward. American soldiers, handcuffed by strict rules of engagement, have surrendered the initiative to their enemies. Most important, the Afghan people, though almost certainly opposed to a Taliban redux, are equally wary of both the Americans and their Afghan “leaders.” They will happily take the riches lavished on them by the Americans, but they will not risk their lives for either the Americans or their own government. The Afghans are waiting to see who prevails, but prevailing is impossible without their help.

We don't have a local partner for peace and there is no central government for which the Afghans are willing to fight and die. This has been the objection to the expanded effort in Afghanistan for years, and apparently it is still true. So what should we do?

The subtitle of West’s book promises a “way out,” but it’s a little thin on exit strategies. His solution, tacked on to the final pages of the book, is to transform the American mission to one almost entirely dedicated to training and advising the Afghan security forces. Let the Afghans fight. “Our mistake in Afghanistan was to do the work of others for 10 years, expecting reciprocity across a cultural and religious divide.”

West is not the first to advocate such a course. But it’s not that simple, as he well knows. Nothing in Afghanistan is. Nine years of training and investment have created an Afghan Army fraught with the same corruption and lack of cohesion as the rest of the country. As it is, the Americans are now pouring more resowurces into the Afghan security forces than ever before. At best, the Afghans are years away from taking over the bulk of the fighting. And even that is a very fragile hope.

[I]f we had Lincoln in the White House, the Afghani equivalent of George Washington in Kabul, and Generals Marshall and Eisenhower peering at maps of Kandahar, we might still lose in Afghanistan. Gen. Petraeus is a great general and a great American, but he is not partnered with Lincoln and Washington.

Conversely, we might be lucky enough to win even without a President committed to victory, but I don't think it is worth the chance. It's too late now, but it would have been better if Obama had never escalated the war.

U.S. Pulling Back in Afghan Valley It Called Vital to WarBy C. J. CHIVERS, ALISSA J. RUBIN and WESLEY MORGAN

KABUL, Afghanistan — After years of fighting for control of a prominent valley in the rugged mountains of eastern Afghanistan, the United States military has begun to pull back most of its forces from ground it once insisted was central to the campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

The withdrawal from the Pech Valley, a remote region in Kunar Province, formally began on Feb. 15. The military projects that it will last about two months, part of a shift of Western forces to the province’s more populated areas. Afghan units will remain in the valley, a test of their military readiness.

While American officials say the withdrawal matches the latest counterinsurgency doctrine’s emphasis on protecting Afghan civilians, Afghan officials worry that the shift of troops amounts to an abandonment of territory where multiple insurgent groups are well established, an area that Afghans fear they may not be ready to defend on their own.

And it is an emotional issue for American troops, who fear that their service and sacrifices could be squandered. At least 103 American soldiers have died in or near the valley’s maze of steep gullies and soaring peaks, according to a count by The New York Times, and many times more have been wounded, often severely.

Military officials say they are sensitive to those perceptions. “People say, ‘You are coming out of the Pech’; I prefer to look at it as realigning to provide better security for the Afghan people,” said Maj. Gen. John F. Campbell, the commander for eastern Afghanistan. “I don’t want the impression we’re abandoning the Pech.”

Retreat, hell - we're just advanving in a new direction.

President Obama’s Afghan troop buildup is now fully in place, and the United States military has its largest-ever contingent in Afghanistan. Mr. Obama’s reinforced campaign has switched focus to operations in Afghanistan’s south, and to building up Afghan security forces.

The previous strategy emphasized denying sanctuaries to insurgents, blocking infiltration routes from Pakistan and trying to fight away from populated areas, where NATO’s superior firepower could be massed, in theory, with less risk to civilians. The Pech Valley effort was once a cornerstone of this thinking.

The new plan stands as a clear, if unstated, repudiation of earlier decisions. When Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the former NATO commander, overhauled the Afghan strategy two years ago, his staff designated 80 “key terrain districts” to concentrate on. The Pech Valley was not one of them.

Ultimately, the decision to withdraw reflected a stark — and controversial — internal assessment by the military that it would have been better served by not having entered the high valley in the first place.

“What we figured out is that people in the Pech really aren’t anti-U.S. or anti-anything; they just want to be left alone,” said one American military official familiar with the decision. “Our presence is what’s destabilizing this area.”

IN PECH VALLEY, AFGHANISTAN -- Earlier this year, Lt. Col. Joseph Ryan concluded that his 800-soldier battalion was locked in an endless war for an irrelevant valley.

"There is nothing strategically important about this terrain," said Ryan, 41, a blunt commander who has spent much of the past decade in combat. "We fight here because the enemy is here. The enemy fights here because we are here."

Ryan's challenge for the past several months has been to figure out a way to leave the Pech Valley, home to about 100,000 Afghans, without handing the insurgents a victory. This fall he launched a series of offensives into the mountains to smash Taliban sanctuaries. His goal is to turn the valley over to Afghan army and police units who would work out their own accommodation with bloodied insurgents.

"The best thing we can do is to pull back," he said, "and let the Afghans figure this place out."

So it is all going according to the latest revised plan and there may be a bit of hype in the current Times headline.

February 24, 2011

The White House explains that Obama is "grappling" with his view on gay marriage. Geez, the suspense is unbearable! Does anyone in the world doubt where he will come out on this? The only question is whether Obama will decide it is politically advantageous to support gay marriage before or after the 2012 election. It may be that he hopes his actions on DADT and now DOMA are enough to placate his base and they won't demand that he utter the magic words. Or, maybe they will.

POSSIBLE COMPROMISE: Maybe Obama could preside at a marriage between two gay soldiers at Gitmo. With Predator drones circling overhead and the Feds wiretapping everyone, to show us how tough (and morally malleable) he is on national security. Naaah...

February 23, 2011

Politifact digs deeply and concludes that Walker's union-busting proposals (as contrasted with the cost-sharing proposals) were ot part of his campaign and really did come out of right field. I had reluctantly reached that same conclusion (on much less research) on Monday.

Orin Kerr on Obama's decision not to defend the Defense of Marriage Act:

...If you look at AG Holder’s reasons for why DOJ won’t defend DOMA, it is premised on DOJ’s adoption of a contested theory of the constitutionality of laws regulating gay rights. The letter says that “the President and [the Attorney General] have concluded that classifications based on sexual orientation warrant heightened scrutiny and that, as applied to same-sex couples legally married under state law then, from that perspective, there is no reasonable defense of DOMA.” This theory is not compelled by caselaw. Rather, it’s a possible result, one that is popular in some circles and not in others but that courts have not weighed in on much yet.

By taking that position, the Obama Administration has moved the goalposts of the usual role of the Executive branch in defending statutes. Instead of requiring DOJ to defend the constitutionality of all federal statutes if it has a reasonable basis to do so, the new approach invests within DOJ a power to conduct an independent constitutional review of the issues, to decide the main issues in the case — in this case, the degree of scrutiny for gay rights issues — and then, upon deciding the main issue, to decide if there is a reasonable basis for arguing the other side. If you take that view, the Executive Branch essentially has the power to decide what legislation it will defend based on whatever views of the Constitution are popular or associated with that Administration. It changes the role of the Executive branch in defending litigation from the traditional dutiful servant of Congress to major institutional player with a great deal of discretion.

If that approach becomes widely adopted, then it would seem to bring a considerable power shift to the Executive Branch. Here’s what I fear will happen. If Congress passes legislation on a largely party-line vote, the losing side just has to fashion some constitutional theories for why the legislation is unconstitutional and then wait for its side to win the Presidency. As soon as its side wins the Presidency, activists on its side can file constitutional challenges based on the theories; the Executive branch can adopt the theories and conclude that, based on the theories, the legislation is unconstitutional; and then the challenges to the legislation will go undefended.

Presumably, under this logic President Palin won't defend ObamaCare in court. Of course, President Palin won't veto a repeal of ObamaCare, either [if a repeal made it past a Democratic filibuster in the Senate].

As to the notion that Obama was going to de-politicize the Department of Justice, well, I presume no one took that seriously anyway.

SOME HISTORY: Jack Balkin thinks this gives liberal courts good political cover and provides some history:

Why does a change in the official position of the Administration matter to federal judges? The answer is that when the President and the Justice Department change their minds publicly and take a new constitutional position, it gives federal courts cover to say that their decisions are consistent with the views of at least one of the national political branches. Agreeing with the President appears less countermajoritarian, even if other parts of the federal government (and the various states) disagree.

Thus, it was only after the Truman Administration asked the Supreme Court to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson in Sweatt v. Painter in 1950, and again in the Brown litigation in 1952, and after the Eisenhower Administration's Justice Department concurred with the Truman Administration when it came into office, that the Supreme Court finally felt comfortable overturning Plessy v. Ferguson in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. After the Bush Administration took the official position that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms in self defense (around 2001), this provided political cover for the Justices to reach the same conclusion in 2008 in District of Columbia v. Heller. Note that the President's explicit and public support for a constitutional position does not have to be a reason explicitly stated in judicial opinions, but it can be an important factor nonetheless.

I would feel better if his historic examples involved a Federal law, not a prior court decision or a local law. [AKS AND RECEIVE - America Blog dug up some nolo contendre examples in order to bash the original Obama decision to defend these cases. This 2005 case about the advocacy of marijuana reform is good:

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Department of Justice has notified Congress that it will not defend a law prohibiting the display of marijuana policy reform ads in public transit systems. The controversial statute was recently ruled unconstitutional by a federal district court. The Solicitor General Paul Clement stated in a letter to Congress that, "the government does not have a viable argument to advance in the statute's defense and will not appeal the district court's decision."

...

As the Wall Street Journal reported today, "Mr. Clement's opinion also could serve as a warning to Congress that it can't assume the Justice Department will support the controversial riders that lawmakers have been adding to funding bills if those riders are challenged in court." The Wall Street Journal added, "Two past solicitors general, Charles Fried and Seth Waxman, said it is rare for a solicitor general to refuse to defend a statute passed by Congress" and that "Mr. Fried, who served under President Reagan, recalled making such a decision only twice."

The law at issue in ACLU et al., v. Norman Y. Mineta is Section 177 of the FY2004 federal spending bill, also known as the 'Istook Amendment,' which threatens to cut off more than $3 billion in federal funding from local transit authorities nationwide that accept advertisements critical of current marijuana laws. Rep. Ernest Istook (R-OK) introduced this amendment to the spending bill last year and Congress re-included the same law in this year's federal budget.

A court ruled that to be a free speech violation and the DoJ couldn't figure out how it wasn't. One might note that the politics ran a bit backwards relative to this DOMA example, since it was a Republican administration dumping a dubious (but potentially pleasing to part of the base) amendment foisted on them by a Republican Congress.

ERRATA: My official editorial position is that the judicial cramdown of gay marriage is highlyprobable. I would prefer a legislative process but I also believe that the cramdown won't be divisive forever, as Roe v. Wade has been - experience will tell whether gay marriage strengthens, weakens or has no effect on marriage; experience with abortion hasn't, and won't, tell us whether life begins at conception.

What’s unfolding in the Arab world today is the mother of all wake-up calls. And what the voice on the other end of the line is telling us is clear as a bell:

“America, you have built your house at the foot of a volcano. That volcano is now spewing lava from different cracks and is rumbling like it’s going to blow. Move your house!” In this case, “move your house” means “end your addiction to oil.”

Hmm, if what the voice was telling us was "clear as a bell", why did Friedman have to explain the message? I suppose it was because the words were clear but the meaning was not, and don'tcha hate those cryptic 3AM phone calls? What, was the Arab Street drunk-dialing us?

Fortunately, we have Tom Friedman to interpret and exhort us, for the umpty-bumpth time, to get off of oil. His big idea - a big Federal gasoline tax, which has made sense for thirty years and has the same grim political prospects it has had for thirty years (the revenue-neutral version has no traction either).

As for the rest, his theme is that the West has empowered the oil dictators for decades but now History has returned to the Arab world. I don't recall the West empowering the rulers of Iran or Libya, and he makes no mention of Islam as a force for social conservatism.

February 22, 2011

The fascinating Stanley Fish writes on the divergence between human intelligence and Watson, the Jeopardy savant. He lost me with his Big Finish:

The achievement is impressive but it is a wholly formal achievement that involves no knowledge (the computer doesn’t know anything in the relevant sense of “know”); and it does not come within a million miles of replicating the achievements of everyday human thought.

Kidding? The computer won at Jeopardy, which is well within a million miles of replicating an "achievment" of human thought. If I have followed correctly, Mr. Fish's point is that replicating the product of human thought is not the same as replicating thought itself. Which leaves me wondering - from a functional perspective, one might well ask, what is the difference? Bring on the Turing test!

As to the notion that Waton lacks creativity, well, what about the meta-studies that medical researchers routinely put out? Do those studies reflect thinking and advance knowledge? What about the data mining employed by Amazon and other marketing companies?

Sifting "old" data and finding previously unremarked connections would seem to be well within the scope of Watson's powers. If Watson "knows" all sorts of stray facts and finds new patterns in them, has it engaged in creative thinking? Maybe - coming up with "Toronto" the other night was surely out-of-the box.

February 21, 2011

Here is an interesting mechanism for resolving the Madison imbroglio, which relies on a quirk in the state's quorum rules:

At issue is a normally obscure Senate rule that requires a quorum of 20 senators to vote on fiscal matters but just 17 to vote on other matters. There are 19 Republicans in the Senate. Mr. Fitzgerald and other members of the Republican leadership planned to meet Monday to establish a schedule for Tuesday’s order of business.

Senator Jon Erpenbach, a Democrat, said that the caucus was aware of the move but that Democrats would remain scattered across the border in Illinois until the restrictions to collective bargaining were off the table.

“They can vote on anything that is nonfiscal,” he said. “They can take up their agenda, they can do whatever they choose to do.”

The move, which came as union members and supporters packed into the capital for a seventh straight day, provoked speculation that the restrictions on collective bargaining included in Gov. Scott Walker’s “budget repair bill” could potentially be added to other legislation as an amendment and passed in the absence of Democrats. It would be another legislative maneuver in a standoff that has seen plenty of them.

The Republicans would argue that the collective bargaining and dues collection provisions are not fiscal, pass them, and let the chips fall. Presumably the increased employee contribution to health care and pensions must be part of a fiscal bill, but the union leaders have already conceded on those points.

FWIW, Candidate Walker made it clear during the campaign that he intended to sock it to the public unions on health and pensions (1, 2, 3, 4). On those points, one might well argue that the voters have spoken (and as noted, the unions have acceded.) As to the proposals that greatly weaken the public unions, I haven't found specific discussion of that during the campaign, although it is hardly a surprise given Walker's history.

Joshua Foer has a fascinating article in the Times about how he transformed himself from a reporter doing a story on memory experts into a champion memory expert himself.

The unlikely story of how I ended up in the finals of the U.S.A. Memory Championship, stock-still and sweating profusely, began a year earlier in the same auditorium, on the 19th floor of the Con Edison building near Union Square in Manhattan. I was there to write a short article about what I imagined would be the Super Bowl of savants.

The scene I stumbled upon, however, was something less than a clash of titans: a bunch of guys (and a few women), varying widely in age and personal grooming habits, poring over pages of random numbers and long lists of words. They referred to themselves as mental athletes, or M.A.’s for short. The best among them could memorize the first and last names of dozens of strangers in just a few minutes, thousands of random digits in under an hour and — to impress those with a more humanistic bent — any poem you handed them.

I asked Ed Cooke, a competitor from England — he was 24 at the time and was attending the U.S. event to train for that summer’s World Memory Championships — when he first realized he was a savant.

“Oh, I’m not a savant,” he said, chuckling.

“Photographic memory?” I asked.

He chuckled again. “Photographic memory is a detestable myth. Doesn’t exist. In fact, my memory is quite average. All of us here have average memories.”

And as demonstration of that "average memories" proposition, the author trained for a year, with record-setting results.

Happy President's Day! The Times tells us that our current President is struggling to straddle the issues in Wisconsin. Our Organizer-in-Chief has always been a big union guy (that has been Dem orthodoxy forever) but lately he has adopted the pose of Fiscal Hero, so naturally he is torn.

This bit where the White House explains that Obama didn't say what he said is pretty funny:

At issue in Madison is less Mr. Walker’s proposed reduction in public employees’ pay and benefits and more his proposal to limit their collective bargaining rights. But people familiar with the protests say the national Democratic Party got engaged days after the demonstrations began and mostly after union officials, liberals and Wisconsin Democrats complained that the Obama organization was missing in action.

Mr. Obama has had strained relations with unions in general, and many do not believe he fights hard enough for their issues; public employee unions have been especially critical lately, since he proposed a two-year freeze of federal employees’ pay.

The Milwaukee television interview that was Mr. Obama’s first involvement in the Madison budget war was sought by the White House not to interject the president into the state’s fight but to promote his separate message concerning his own national budget-cutting drama: the station broadcasts into the district of the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, Representative Paul D. Ryan.

In the interview, the president sought to thread the needle between supporting the need for public employees to sacrifice while defending their bargaining rights: “Some of what I’ve heard coming out of Wisconsin, where they’re just making it harder for public employees to collectively bargain generally, seems like more of an assault on unions.”

That comment was “inappropriate,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said on the NBC program “Meet the Press” on Sunday.

February 20, 2011

The NY Times editors continue to work on their five minutes. Their latest draft includes some great material about leadership and Obama's Muslimosity. The mini-howler is here:

This Just In ...

But the speaker of the House, John Boehner, made it clear on the NBC program “Meet the Press” last Sunday that he had no interest in quashing these fantasies or stopping his fellow Republicans from accusing Mr. Obama of lying about his citizenship and his faith.

Pressed by the show’s host, David Gregory, Mr. Boehner said — grudgingly — that an assurance from the government of Hawaii that Mr. Obama was born an American citizen was “good enough for me.” And that when Mr. Obama says he is a Christian, “I’ll take him at his word.” But he said it was “not my job” to try to do anything about it. “The American people have the right to think what they think,” he said.

Well, the President could request his full birth file from the State of Hawaii any time he wants to, yet he has chosen not to, as careful readers of the Times learned a while back.

Rather than wonder why it is John Boehner's job to clear the air, the Times might ponder the possibility that a notable portion of the public seems to think that a man who is hiding something might have something to hide. When will the Times exhort Obama to request and release his file? (My guess is "Never". Does "Never" work for you?)

But let's press on to their comic climax:

If Mr. Boehner really wanted to lead, he could make this obvious but important point: Being a Muslim is not a disqualification for being president of the United States.

If Mr. Boehner made this point, the Times editors that survived their ensuing aneurysms would fulminate that he was engaging in back-handed promotion of the notion that Obama was a Muslim.

This sort of racism stained American politics in earlier centuries. It has no place in this one.

Being Muslim is a race, not a religion? Hmm, maybe anti-Catholicism was also racist? I try to learn something new every day.

For my money, I lean towards Bill Maher's view that Obama is a Christian by convenience rather than conviction. But if, while Obama was sauntering towards Air Force One for a weekend away, his bag popped open and a Koran and a prayer rug fell out, well, I would not object to his being a Muslim; I would object to his being a liar.

The very astute Karl Rove would take me to task on these topics, arguing that Republicans have plenty of real, winning issues to air against Obama. My extrapolation of his view is that Times' editors see enormous political advantage in writing drivel about Boehner and birthers rather than tackling something more topical such as Obama's dubious backing of the public sector unions in Wisconsin.

February 19, 2011

Revolutions everywhere--in the middle east, in the middle west. But there is a difference: in the middle east, the protesters are marching for democracy; in the middle west, they're protesting against it. I mean, Isn't it, well, a bit ironic that the protesters in Madison, blocking the state senate chamber, are chanting "Freedom, Democracy, Union" while trying to prevent a vote?

...

An election was held in Wisconsin last November. The Republicans won. In a democracy, there are consequences to elections and no one, not even the public employees unions, are exempt from that.

Well, the unions think they are exempt, and they have Obama on their side. For now.

Public employees unions are an interesting hybrid. Industrial unions are organized against the might and greed of ownership. Public employees unions are organized against the might and greed...of the public?

February 18, 2011

Meanwhile, back in China the head of their national rail service has been sacked. Why? Good question! Corruption is the obvious answer, but any large-scale goverment project in China is ridded with back-scratching and favor-trding (unlike here in America.) The WSJ says the real problem may be huge debts and limited, expensive tickets. Which would never hapen here.

The old so-called Wisconsin Idea was that government would collaborate with experts drawn from the state’s university system to craft progressive legislation. The new Wisconsin Idea is that the state is broke.

Gov. Scott Walker is bringing austerity to the intellectual breadbasket of American progressivism, and seeks to break the grip of the public-sector unions in a state that had a large hand in empowering them. His effort could become a national model for recalibrating the relationship of state governments to the unions that are bankrupting them.

Stanley Kurtz describes Obama as the "Radical-in-Chief" who hopes to polarize America along class lines and energize a lefty populist movement. The WaPo tells us that Obama's "Organizing For America" is now organizing for the Democrats in Madison.

The ever so well-connected David Brooks mixes kind words and condemnation of Obama's budget, which he describes as "laughably inadequate compared with the fiscal problems before us". He opens rather rudely:

Jonathan Alter wrote a book about Barack Obama’s first year in office called “The Promise.” That’s a great title because it works on so many levels. For example, over the past four years, Obama’s career has been marked by a constant promise: He has continually said he is on the verge of doing something serious abut the national debt.

Mr. Brooks then takes us back to 2006 and "The Audacity of Hope" and tracks Obama's enduring refrain over the next five years- the budget axe will come out tomorrow:

He started making the promise back when he was in the Senate. In “The Audacity of Hope,” published in 2006, he expressed alarm at the “mountain of debt” caused by $300 billion annual budget deficits. (They’re now $1.6 trillion.) During the presidential campaign, he pledged to put away childish things and tackle the tough budget issues.

During the transition, he said the time to act on the debt is now. “What we have done is kicked the can down the road,” he told The Washington Post. “We are now at the end of the road and are not in a position to kick it any further.” He said he would start a budget initiative in February 2009.

After the stimulus package passed, he and his aides said it would soon be time to turn to deficit issues. The same promise was made after health care reform. He made the pledge yet again at a press conference this week. Right now is not the time, the president always says, but tomorrow we will get serious.

But tomorrow never comes.

Yeah, yeah - Obama has gulled a lot of folks with his "thoughtful and concerned" shtick. Now, on to the kind words (which should at least assure Mr. Brooks' continued access to the West Wing):

Two explanations are commonly offered to explain why the White House decided to kick the can down the road. Some analysts say the Democrats are trying for a repeat of 1995: Do nothing on the deficit; goad the Republicans into announcing entitlement cutbacks and then savage them on the campaign trail for cutting off granny.

I don’t believe this is in the president’s head. It would be morally reprehensible to bankrupt the nation for the sake of a campaign theme. Obama is not that sort of person.

Hmm, one might imagine it would be morally reprehensible to assure people falsely that if they like their health insurance, they can keep it under ObamaCare. But let's play along and imagine that Mr. Brooks is a shrewd tactician trying to cajole the President rather than excoriate him:

The other explanation is that Obama is following the model of the 1983 Social Security deal. Be patient, the president argued at his press conference this week. If I lead from the front my proposal will get stymied in the partisan circus. Better to lead from the back and have negotiations in private with Republican leaders. Then when the time is ripe, we’ll cut a deal outside the glare of the scream machine.

The president and his aides may really believe in this strategy, but it is wrong. This is not like fixing Social Security in the early 1980s. The current debt problem is of an entirely different scale. It requires a rewrite of the social contract, a new way to think about how the government pays for social insurance.

The president has enormous faith in getting smart people around the table and initiating technocratic reform. But you can’t renegotiate the social contract in private. You have to have public buy-in. You have to spend years out in public educating voters about the size of the problem and what will be required. You have to show voters what a solution looks like.

Well, yes - this topic is big enough that Presidential leadership is required. But who expects it? After announcing a broad vision Obama flipped the keys to Nancy and Harry on his two signature issues of his Presidency, the stimulus bill and health care reform.

As to the notion that re-writing the social contract requires public buy-in - uhh, first it requires Presidential buy-in. Is there any evidence that Obama has left the 80's and his Euro-fascination behind?

February 16, 2011

Roughly speaking, I'd say there have only been three big GDP-busting inventions over the past few centuries: the steam engine, electrification, and the digital computer.

And speaking of waiting for the Next Big Thing, Sasha Volokh explains that strict libertarians might well oppose a government tax intended to save us from an asteroid disaster. He expands on that logic in the comments:

My view (which is not unusual for libertarians) is that government occupies no special position. Whether it acts morally is judged by the same standard as whether a group of people, a gang, a mafia, etc., act morally. So, presumptively, taking money from people involuntarily (taxation) is immoral. But I believe that stuff that’s presumptively immoral becomes moral if the result of that rights violation is to protect other rights to a greater extent. So taxation is justifiable if and only if that taxation leads to a greater protection of rights. So to see whether the asteroid program is justifiable, we have to see whether it would protect rights (which would be automatically true if an asteroid impact would violate rights).

Now the harder question: would an asteroid impact violate rights? I’ve presented an implicit view of rights where a violation requires some sort of human action. Probably it would go something like this: a right is an ability to act without interference by someone else. So two issues arise: (1) Why the “someone else”? Why don’t you have a right to act without interference, period? (2) This doesn’t arise in the asteroid hypo, but it arises in other contexts: if “someone else” is necessary, does it have to be someone else’s intentional activity, or something else? (This affects, e.g., what kind of tort and criminal system are justifiable.)

Tentatively, I’ve thought that you at least need interference by some other conscious being (leave aside questions of whether the interference has to be intentional, or whether the act leading to the interference has to be intentional, or whether intent of any kind is necessary). The reason is that I sort of take the natural world to be the background condition of reality: it’s just seemed self-evident to me that, e.g., your right to life isn’t violated when you’re struck by lightning. Among other things, it’s seemed to me that you should have a rights violator for every rights violation, so if no one’s violating your rights, there’s no rights violation.

But maybe I’m wrong about that.

If the government is organized to protect us from each other, he is right; if the government is organized to protect us from actions and events that endanger all, and where free-ridership is an issue, then he is wrong.

Should the good citizens of Ohio be taxed to provide flood insurance to Snooki and the other residents of the Jersey Shore? Probably not. Should a rural fire department be obliged to save every house? Probably not.

But in a urban setting, fire spreads easily. One would expect the fire department to battle every blaze, even those initiated by lightning. And one would expect the locals to tax themselves accordingly.

February 15, 2011

OK, I saw Day Two of the Man v. Machine Jeopardy challenge. It was baffling - I knew plenty of the answers just sitting at home shouting at my television (is there any other way to watch Jeopardy?), so I know that the two human champions had plenty of answers, too. But they just never seemed to buzz in. I am puzzled about the timing of the input of the questions to Watson and the spped at which Watson can buzz in. (Maybe those were answered on the first day, which I missed.)

That said, the Final Jeopardy question was a headscratcher. Paraphrased, it was "This city has one airport named after a WWII hero and another named afer a WWII battle".

The category was US Cities, and the clue was: “Its largest airport was named for a World War II hero; its second largest, for a World War II battle.”]

I can probably name about six airports in America, but I knew Midway in Chicago could be a battle and O'Hare might well be a hero, so I went with Chi-town, as did both humans. And right we were! The O'Hare story is a classic bit of Americana, too:

A few years later, O'Hare was honored when Colonel Robert R. McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, suggested a name change of Chicago's Orchard Depot Airport as tribute to Butch O'Hare. On September 19, 1949, the Chicago, Illinois airport was renamed O'Hare International Airport. The airport displays a Grumman F4F-3[1][2] museum aircraft replicating the one flown by Butch O'Hare during his Medal of Honor flight.

But that is not what gave Butch (who was from St. Louis) his Chicago connection. Here is his dad's story:

Butch's father was a lawyer who worked closely with Al Capone before turning against him and helping convict Capone of tax evasion.[3]

...In November 1939, his father was shot, most likely by Al Capone's gunmen. During Capone's tax evasion trial in 1931 and 1932, O'Hare's father provided incriminating evidence which helped finally put Capone away. There is speculation that this was done to ensure that Butch got into the Naval Academy, or to set a good example. Whatever the motivation, the elder O'Hare was shot down in his car, a week before Capone was released from incarceration.

Whoa.

Anyway, Watson went to sea on this question, answering "Toronto?????".

How could the machine have been so wrong? David Ferrucci, the manager of the Watson project at IBM Research, explained on the company’s blog that several things probably confused Watson, as reported by Steve Hamm:

First, the category names on Jeopardy! are tricky. The answers often do not exactly fit the category. Watson, in his training phase, learned that categories only weakly suggest the kind of answer that is expected, and, therefore, the machine downgrades their significance. The way the language was parsed provided an advantage for the humans and a disadvantage for Watson, as well. “What US city” wasn’t in the question. If it had been, Watson would have given US cities much more weight as it searched for the answer. Adding to the confusion for Watson, there are cities named Toronto in the United States and the Toronto in Canada has an American League baseball team. It probably picked up those facts from the written material it has digested. Also, the machine didn’t find much evidence to connect either city’s airport to World War II. (Chicago was a very close second on Watson’s list of possible answers.) So this is just one of those situations that’s a snap for a reasonably knowledgeable human but a true brain teaser for the machine.

The XM25 has changed the battlefield with only 55 rounds, and earned a new name among soldiers. They call it “the Punisher.”

Since its first contact Dec. 3, the XM25 has been in nine engagements with two units at different locations, officials said. Specifically, it has disrupted two insurgent attacks on observation posts, taken out two PKM machine gun positions and destroyed four ambush sites.

In one engagement, an enemy machine gunner was “so badly wounded or so freaking scared that he dropped [his] weapon” and ran, said Lt. Col. Christopher Lehner, Program Manager Individual Weapons.

The trick? This is a very high-tech grenade launcher:

The XM25 has a target acquisition system that calculates range with the push of a button. The data is transferred to an electronic fuse, enabling the 25mm round to explode over the target and rain shell fragments on the enemy.

At first glance, the XM-25 looks like something out of a Sci-Fi movie. It features an array of sights, sensors and lasers housed in a Target Acquisition Fire Control unit on top, an oversized magazine behind the trigger mechanism, and a short, ominous barrel wrapped by a recoil dampening sleeve.

Unlike a Hollywood prop, however, this weapon is very real and designed to accurately deliver an explosive round that neutralizes targets at distances of up to 700 meters - well past the range of the rifles and carbines that most Soldiers carry today.

"What makes this weapon system truly revolutionary is the ability to target the enemy, pass on this information to the sensors and microchips of its 25mm HEAB round, and have that round detonate over the target," explained Maj. Shawn Murray, a Soldier Weapons assistant product manager in PEO Soldier, the organization responsible for developing the XM-25.

"When the HEAB round explodes, the target is peppered with fragmentation," Murray said. "Our studies indicate that the XM-25 with HEAB is 300 percent more effective at incapacitating the enemy than current weapons at the squad level."

Because of the XM-25's unique TAFC and HEAB round, Soldiers will be able to engage enemy forces located in the open and "in defilade" -behind cover, such as walls, rocks, trenches, or inside buildings. The semi-automatic weapon's magazine holds four 25mm rounds and can be employed at night or during inclement weather thanks to the XM25's built-in thermal sight.

February 14, 2011

The Politico tells us that at least ten states are considering "birther" bills obliging Presidential candidates to establish their Constitutional eligibility. Geez, we are only talking about the highest office in the land - it's not like we are trying to get a kid into Little League.

Team Obama's early approach to this amounted to "Screw you, our guy has a 65% approval rating and you're a racist". Now the approval rating is gone, the racist argument is played out, and people still seem to wonder why the normal rules don't apply to Obama.

Obama could ask for his full birth file from the State of Hawaii and have it by the weekend - instead of saving the material for his eventual big book deal, maybe he ought to show that even he has to play by the rules.

FWIW: My Official Editorial Prediction is that the full file will be uninteresting and probably conclusive. But there may be surprises! One notion is that Obama was originally named "Barry" and legally chaged his name to "Barack" later; the omission of that detail from "Dreams From My Father" might be embarrasing.

Or, the file may inform us that Baby Barack was legally adopted by his mother's second husband, which may (or may not) cloud his citizenship status, which would be another forgotten tidbit from the Obama biography - sooo suspenseful!

THOSE WHO DO NOT REMEMBER THE PAST... Paul Waldman of TAP is outraged that House Speaker Jhn Boehner won't stand up to those crazy birthers, and closes with this:

The next time you hear someone say that both parties have their crazies, ask whether the highest-ranking elected official in the Democratic party ever went on television and said of those who believe George W. Bush had advance knowledge of the September 11 attacks, "It's not my job to tell the American people what to think."

I guess he is serious, and that "highest-ranking elected official" gives him a bit if wiggle room. Back when he was the Dem front-runner for the Presidential nomination in 2003, Howard Dean said this:

DEAN: There is a report, which the president is suppressing evidence for, which is a thorough investigation of 9/11.

REHM: Why do you think he's suppressing that report?

DEAN: I don't know. There are many theories about it. The most interesting theory that I've heard so far, which is nothing more than a theory, I can't -- think it can't be proved, is that he was warned ahead of time by the Saudis. Now, who knows what the real situation is, but the trouble is by suppressing that kind of information, you lead to those kinds of theories, whether they have any truth to them or not, and then eventually they get repeated as fact. So I think the president is taking a great risk by suppressing the clear -- the key information that needs to go to the Kean commission.

Dean was not the highest elected Democrat (although he eventually chaired the DNC), and that was on a NPR radio show, so maybe Waldman will claim a pass.

And here is John Edwards, the 2004 VP pick running in 2007 and promising to "look into" Bush's role in the 9/11 plot. Again, not on national television, not the "top elected" Dem. Still, let's not pretend that the Dems colected profiles in courage while standing up to Michael Moore and the truthers.

Snowfalls in China’s major wheat- growing regions failed to ease a drought, a government agency said. Wheat prices climbed to the highest level since August 2008 in Chicago and to a record in Zhengzhou.

China’s drought-control headquarters posted a statement on its Web site on Sunday that described conditions as “grim” across a wide area of the wheat belt in Northern China and called for emergency irrigation efforts.

Agricultural experts say it is too early to assess the damage to the wheat harvest.

“We are in the winter months now, when it is typically drier anyway, so the seedlings should still be alive,” said an expert at Shandong Agricultural University who would provide only his family name, Wang. “But if the weather turns warmer and there is still no rain, then we will not be talking about lower agricultural production, but rather zero production, because the seedlings will all be dead.”

Rainfall “can make or break the Chinese wheat crop,” said Michael Pitts, a commodity sales director at National Australia Bank Ltd. “If we get rainfall over the next two months, the problems go away,” he said.

The provinces hit hardest by the drought are Shandong, Jiangsu, Henan, Hebei and Shanxi. Together, they accounted for 67 percent of Chinese wheat production in 2009, the FAO said on Feb. 8. China has 14 million hectares planted with winter wheat in those provinces, of which about 5.2 million hectares may have been damaged, it said.

And the Times reminded us a few days ago that China won't be going hungry:

World wheat prices are already surging, and they have been widely cited as one reason for protests in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. A separate United Nations report last week said global food export prices had reached record levels in January. The impact of China’s drought on global food prices and supplies could create serious problems for less affluent countries that rely on imported food.

With $2.85 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, nearly three times that of Japan, the country with the second-largest reserves, China has ample buying power to prevent any serious food shortages.

“They can buy whatever they need to buy, and they can outbid anyone,” Mr. Zeigler said. China’s self-sufficiency in grain prevented world food prices from moving even higher when they spiked three years ago, he said.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said Tuesday that 12.75 million acres of China’s 35 million acres of wheat fields had been affected by the drought. It said that 2.57 million people and 2.79 million head of livestock faced shortages of drinking water.

FOR THE NON-WHEATIES OUT THERE: Folks eyeballing the wheat production chart may marvel, as I did, at the output of "FSU". How 'bout them Seminoles! But it turns out that "FSU" is "former Soviet Union". Booooring.

NOW WE ARE DOING CHINESE WEATHER FORECASTS. The map shows provincial capitals, not province names. Inscrutable.

February 13, 2011

Now that Mubarak is out the NY Times is playing kissy-face with their White House sources, who use this friendly platform to toss Hillary under the bus and assure us that Barack has always been a beacon of freedom:

WASHINGTON — Last Saturday afternoon, President Obama got a jarring update from his national security team: With restive crowds of young Egyptians demanding President Hosni Mubarak’s immediate resignation, Frank G. Wisner, Mr. Obama’s envoy to Cairo, had just told a Munich conference that Mr. Mubarak was indispensable to Egypt’s democratic transition.

Mr. Obama was furious, and it did not help that his secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Wisner’s key backer, was publicly warning that any credible transition would take time — even as Mr. Obama was demanding that change in Egypt begin right away.

Seething about coverage that made it look as if the administration were protecting a dictator and ignoring the pleas of the youths of Cairo, the president “made it clear that this was not the message we should be delivering,” said one official who was present. He told Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to take a hard line with his Egyptian counterpart, and he pushed Senator John Kerry to counter the message from Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Wisner when he appeared on a Sunday talk show the next day.

Yeah, send out John Kerry to hit the talk shows! That's leadership! Just to flash back briefly, last week the Times was expaining that Wisner was a loose cannon and Hillary was handling the back-pedaling. Now that Mubarak appears safely out, Barack is the genius and Hillary was part of the problem. Whatever. I am sure the White House sources are delighted with this coverage so it is all good for the Times.

That said, if I were given the opportuity to present my preferred spin in the Times, I would have chosen differently than these White House acolytes. Some background:

Inside the White House, the same aides who during his campaign pushed Mr. Obama to challenge the assumptions of the foreign policy establishment were now arguing that his failure to side with the protesters could be remembered with bitterness by a rising generation.

But set against that was Obama's own pragmatism:

Despite the fervor on the streets of Cairo, and Mr. Obama’s occasional tough language, the president always took a pragmatic view of how to use America’s limited influence over change in Egypt. He was not in disagreement with the positions of Mr. Wisner and Mrs. Clinton about how long transition would take. But he apparently feared that saying so openly would reveal that the United States was not in total sync with the protesters, and was indeed putting its strategic interests first. Making that too clear would not only anger the crowds, it could give Mr. Mubarak a reason to cling to power and a pretext to crush the revolution.

The "stability" issue did not just come to the tempermentally cautious Hillary in a dream:

Mrs. Clinton and some of her State Department subordinates wanted to move cautiously, and reassure allies they were not being abandoned, in part influenced by daily calls from Israel, Saudi Arabia and others who feared an Egypt without Mr. Mubarak would destabilize the entire region. Some were nervous because they perceived that the United States had been a cheerleader for the Tunisia protesters.

And on to the chosen White House spin:

In fact, some of the differences in approach stemmed from the institutional biases of the State Department versus those of the White House. The diplomats at the State Department view the Egyptian crisis through the lens of American strategic interests in the region, its threat to the 1979 peace accord between Egypt and Israel, and its effects on the Middle East peace process.

The White House shared those concerns, officials said, but workers in the West Wing also worried that if Mr. Obama did not encourage the young people in the streets with forceful, even inspiring language, he would be accused of abandoning the ideals he expressed in his 2009 speech in Cairo.

So let's see - the State Department was worried abut US allies and strategic interests; the heroes in the White House were worried about Obama's personal credibility. Hmm, is that really how the White House wants to present this? Not to belabor the obvious, but many of us believe that the US will have both allies and interests even after Barack has moved on. (And yes, one of those many interests will be in having a US President with the popularity and credibility to rally other nations in pursuit of our interests. Sort of like the bang-up job Obama has done getting other nations to shoulder the load in Afghanistan.)

As to the possibility that Obama would betray the Arab street - geez, has he closed Gitmo, ended executive branch assasinations by Predator, and all the rest? Not yet! Is it really possible that Obama's advisers put Obama's credibility with the Arab street ahead of his cred with the American street? Looks like it.

GLOOMY AFTERTHOUGHT: If I were an energetic White House staffer trying to win Obama to my side, would I say (a) "this decision is in America's best interests", or (b) "this decision wil make you look good"? I am thinking specifically of Obama's unwillingness to cut himself loose from Jeremiah "God DAMN America" Wright until Wright questioned Obama's integrity; Wright saying whatever he wanted about whites and America had never been that big a deal previously.

SKEPTICS CORNER: Lest you doubt the notion that the Times handed the printing press to the Whote Hosue staff Taylor Marsh says the article "looks a lot like a planted article from the White House".

And the Hillary-bashing (which revised last week's Hillary-boosting) gulled at least one lib, who boasts that he has always backed Obama over Hillary.

February 11, 2011

Mubarak takes a mulligan on last night's speech - now he is stepping down:

CAIRO — President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt turned over all power to the military, and left the Egyptian capital for his resort home in Sharm el-Sheik, Vice President Omar Suleiman announced on state television on Friday.

The announcement, delivered during evening prayers in Cairo, set off a frenzy of celebration, with protesters shouting “Egypt is free!”

The Egyptian military issued a communiqué pledging to carry out a variety of constitutional reforms in a statement notable for its commanding tone. The military’s statement alluded to the delegation of power to Vice President Omar Suleiman and it suggested that the military would supervise implementation of the reforms.

My instant, uninformed reaction - if Mubarak had announced last night that he was stepping aside in favor of Suleiman and a group of generals, the popular reaction would have been that the faces had changed but the regime remains the same.

Today, since he is stepping aside in response to overwhelming public rejection of his speech, the public response seems to be a sense of empowerment and change.

Slick marketing by the regime, if this flies.

OR, IF YOU DON'T LIKE THAT IDEA I HAVE OTHERS:

Upon booth review, we are considering the possibility that Mubarak is secretly from Missouri, the "Show Me" state. Yesterday his aides greased the skids and tried to get him to gdepart gracefully, without success. Today, having seen how well he is loved and how successful his speech was, he is prepared to move on.

Smokers now face another risk from their habit: it could cost them a shot at a job.

More hospitals and medical businesses in many states are adopting strict policies that make smoking a reason to turn away job applicants, saying they want to increase worker productivity, reduce health care costs and encourage healthier living.

The health care cost argument could be advanced by any employer that sponsors a health plan that can't incorporate a smoker's premium in the rate. As to productivity, I can picture two issues: lost employee time due to increased sick days, with the associated aggravation of bringing in temporary replacement workers; and lost time each day as the smokers trudge to ad from the few remaining legal smoking sites.

The policies reflect a frustration that softer efforts — like banning smoking on company grounds, offering cessation programs and increasing health care premiums for smokers — have not been powerful-enough incentives to quit.

The new rules essentially treat cigarettes like an illegal narcotic. Applications now explicitly warn of “tobacco-free hiring,” job seekers must submit to urine tests for nicotine and new employees caught smoking face termination.

This shift — from smoke-free to smoker-free workplaces — has prompted sharp debate, even among anti-tobacco groups, over whether the policies establish a troubling precedent of employers intruding into private lives to ban a habit that is legal.

First they came for the smokers...

If the issues are health care costs and lost sick days (rather than marching to and from safe smoking zones), other activities might one day be targeted:

One concern voiced by groups like the National Workrights Institute is that such policies are a slippery slope — that if they prove successful in driving down health care costs, employers might be emboldened to crack down on other behavior by their workers, like drinking alcohol, eating fast food and participating in risky hobbies like motorcycle riding. The head of the Cleveland Clinic was both praised and criticized when he mused in an interview two years ago that, were it not illegal, he would expand the hospital policy to refuse employment to obese people.

“There is nothing unique about smoking,” said Lewis Maltby, president of the Workrights Institute, who has lobbied vigorously against the practice. “The number of things that we all do privately that have negative impact on our health is endless. If it’s not smoking, it’s beer. If it’s not beer, it’s cheeseburgers. And what about your sex life?”

If we want to live in a world where everyone gets their health insurance at the same price regardless of pre-existing conditions or risky lifestyle choices, then the healthy and prudent should resign themselves to subsidizing everyone else. Oddly, Obamacare is the solution here (if it lives that long!) - employers will have yet another reason to dump their employees into the subsidized exchanges and let We The People handle the subsidies to the risk-seekers.

Let's note that there are some legal issues that would also prompt companies to prefer to terminate their employer-sponsored plans:

About 1 in 5 Americans still smoke, and smoking remains the leading cause of preventable deaths. And employees who smoke cost, on average, $3,391 more a year each for health care and lost productivity, according to federal estimates.

“We felt it was unfair for employees who maintained healthy lifestyles to have to subsidize those who do not,” Steven C. Bjelich, chief executive of St. Francis Medical Center in Cape Girardeau, Mo., which stopped hiring smokers last month. “Essentially that’s what happens.”

Two decades ago — after large companies like Alaska Airlines, Union Pacific and Turner Broadcasting adopted such policies — 29 states and the District of Columbia passed laws, with the strong backing of the tobacco lobby and the American Civil Liberties Union, that prohibit discrimination against smokers or those who use “lawful products.” Some of those states, like Missouri, make an exception for health care organizations.

"Lawful products" certainly includes cigarettes, motorcycles, beer and french fries.

Mubarak pulls the Old Switcheroo, shocking demonstrators and an international audience and confounding media reports with his announcement that he will stay on.

Among those scrambling to keep up with events - Leon Panetta, head of the CIA:

WASHINGTON – CIA Director Leon Panetta says U.S. intelligence indicates that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is on his way out.

Panetta tells Congress that his information indicates Mubarak could be out by Thursday night. He says there is a "high likelihood" of that.

Panetta did not say exactly how the CIA reached that conclusion. He says Mubarak's exit would be "significant" in moving Egypt to an "orderly transition" of power.

Panetta did not compromise his vast intelligence sources, but the Times had this:

American officials said Mr. Panetta was basing his statement not on secret intelligence but on media broadcasts, which began circulating before he sat down before the House Intelligence Committee.

Wow. It is not as if the House Intelligence Committee can't budget a subscription to cable news. However, if memory serves, Tom Clancy mentioned in one of his novels that for live, breaking news CNN often has more valuable resources than the CIA.

Jamie Smith, director of the office of public affairs for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence later said in a statement to ABC News: “To clarify Director Clapper’s point - in Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood makes efforts to work through a political system that has been, under Mubarak’s rule, one that is largely secular in its orientation – he is well aware that the Muslim Brotherhood is not a secular organization.”

So he is well aware that the Muslim Brotherhood (the name is only the first clue!) is not secular, which means he is well aware that his statement to Congress was daft.

So why are we cozying up to the Muslim Brotherhood? I Boldy Predict more Winning The Future moments from Obama and company as the Egyptian saga unfolds.

President Obama and his aides were blindsided by the crisis from the beginning (as were we in the news media), and I fear that they’ve mishandled it since. When the protests began, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton described Mr. Mubarak’s government as “stable” and “looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people.”

Then our special envoy, Frank Wisner, called for Mr. Mubarak to stay in power, saying: “President Mubarak’s continued leadership is critical.” The White House has tried to backtrack, but it has been backtracking from backtracks so much that on Egypt its symbol might as well be a weather vane.

Uh huh. Team Obama could offer a weathervane as a symbol but it would take them months of polling and focus-grouping to figure out what the weather vane ought to look like. (I picture a donkey with its tail between its legs. Well, among my ideas that are anatomically possible...)

Back to Mr. Kristof:

When well-known journalists like Anderson Cooper of CNN were being beaten up in Tahrir Square, the White House found its voice. But now that foreign reporters are no longer being routinely harassed, it has lost its sense of urgency. “Now” is no longer in the White House lexicon.

Many years ago, when I studied Arabic intensively at the American University in Cairo, I was bewildered initially because for the first couple of months I learned only the past tense. That’s the basic tense in Arabic, and so in any Arabic conversation I was locked into the past.

The Obama administration seems equally caught in the past, in ways that undermine the secular pro-Western forces that are Egypt’s best hope. I hope the White House learns the future tense.

Webb appeared likely to face a rematch with former Senator George Allen, whom he beat in a bruising 2006 contest. He had expressed ambivalence about the prospect of another run, and has said he never planned a life in politics.

Keeping Webb -- a Vietnam veteran, former Reagan defense official, and author -- in the Senate had been a top priority for the Democratic leadership, with no Democrat of Webb's prominence, and his centrist politics, openly exploring the race. Senate Democratic leaders view Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine, the former Virginia governor, as a top prospect to replace him, despite Kaine's disavowals that he's looking at the race. Kaine, the source said, hasn't shut the door on the possibility. Former Congressman Tom Perriello, who is close to the White House, could also be a candidate.

Republicans were already hoping to pick up this seat, and their odds have improvedi

Hillary Clinton explains that we can't end drug-related violence by legalizing drugs because "there is just too much money in it".

Hmm. On the broader topic of protecting our ation's youths from themselves, I happen to think we can't get the high-fructose corn syrup out of soda and sports drinks for the same reason. I happen to think we can't get vending machines selling junk food and junk drinks out of high schools for the same reason. But I am thinking about political influence, and I imagine Hillary meant something quite different (if she meant anything at all).

February 08, 2011

Adam Liptak of the Times, discussing McCain-Feingold and the Supre Court's Citizens United ruling, delivers harsh news to Times readers and his own editorial board - if corporations have no free speech rights and newspapers are corporations then... hmm, Socrates is mortal? No! Newspapers have no special free speech rights! An awkward moment, since the Times does not intend to stop endorsing candidates (or giving their chosen ones shoulder rides).

In the year since the Supreme Court handed down its 183-page decision in Citizens United, the liberal objection to it has gradually boiled down to a single sentence: The majority was wrong to grant First Amendment rights to corporations.

That critique is incomplete. As Justice John Paul Stevens acknowledged in his dissent, the court had long recognized that “corporations are covered by the First Amendment.” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority, listed more than 20 precedents saying that.

But an old and established rule can still be wrong, and it may be that the liberal critique is correct. If it is, though, it must confront a very hard question. If corporations have no First Amendment rights, what about newspapers and other news organizations, almost all of which are organized as corporations?

The usual response is that the press is different. The First Amendment, after all, protects “the freedom of speech, or of the press.” Since “the press” is singled out for protection, the argument goes, media corporations enjoy First Amendment rights while other corporations do not.

But the argument is weak. There is little evidence that the drafters of the First Amendment meant to single out a set of businesses for special protection. Nor is there much support for that idea in the Supreme Court’s decisions, which have rejected the argument that the institutional press has rights beyond those of the other speakers.

There is a practical problem, too, especially in the Internet era. Who, after all, is “the press”? Anyone with a Twitter account?

And a bit more:

“The First Amendment refers both to freedom of speech and of the press,” he [Malcolm L. Stewart, a lawyer for the Obama administration at the first of two arguments in Citizens United] said at one point. “There would be a potential argument that media corporations, the institutional press, would have a greater First Amendment right.”

In his dissent, Justice Stevens called that question “interesting and difficult,” and he did not quite embrace special protection for the institutional press either. “One type of corporation, those that are part of the press, might be able to claim special First Amendment status,” he wrote.

Justice Antonin Scalia reviewed the historical evidence in his concurrence.

“It is passing strange,” he wrote, “to interpret the phrase ‘the freedom of speech, or of the press’ to mean, not everyone’s right to speak or publish, but rather everyone’s right to speak or the institutional press’s right to publish. No one thought that is what it meant.”

In a 2008 book, “Freedom for the Thought That We Hate,” Anthony Lewis, a former Supreme Court reporter and columnist for The New York Times, reached the same conclusion. “The amendment surely meant to cover both oral and written expression,” he wrote, rather than “a specially protected institution.”

The Supreme Court’s decisions interpreting the press clause have also said the institutional press has no special status.

Why has it taken a year for the Times to be admitting this?

MORE: Ann Althouse has the same question. Following a booth review, I have a theory. With the ObamaCare cases moving through the courts, the Times set its reporters the task of gauging whether the Supremes were so dastardly and rigidly ideological that they might actually shut down ObamaCare. One example, of their perfidy, obviously, was the Citizens United case.

But as the Timesman chatted with experts about this and that, they discovered that citing Citizens United as an example of judicial extremism was absurd. Troubling!

And so begins the slog back to reality, through drifting snow and melting slush. Uphill. Both ways.

GOOD POINT: We're talking about the Times - it's all downhill from here.

Controversy swirls around the 17th Karmapa, the number three monk in the Tibetan Buddhism hierarchy and a likely leader of Tibetan exiles:

DHARAMSALA, India — His daring escape from Tibet seemed out of a movie. Then only 14, Ogyen Trinley Dorje was one of Tibetan Buddhism’s most revered incarnate lamas, and his journey through the icy passes of the Himalayas was viewed as a major embarrassment for China. The youth arrived in India in early 2000 to a euphoric greeting from Tibetan exiles.

India, though, was less certain about what to do with him. Intelligence agencies, suspicious of his loyalties and skeptical of his miraculous escape, interrogated him and tightly restricted his travel. He remains mostly confined to the mountainside monastery of a Tibetan sect different from his own.

Why the skepticism?

The Indian police are investigating the Karmapa after discovering about $1 million in foreign currency at his residence, including more than $166,000 in Chinese currency. Flimsily sourced media accounts have questioned whether he is a Chinese spy plotting a monastic empire along the border.

Many Tibetans scoff at the spying allegations. But the episode starkly exposes the precarious position of the Dalai Lama and the exiled movement of Tibetan Buddhism he has led since he fled China in 1959. The Tibetan cause depends heavily on Indian good will, particularly as China has intensified efforts to discredit and infiltrate their exile organization.

...

Indian suspicions about the Karmapa are a particular problem. He has a global following and, at 25 years old, he is viewed as a potential future leader of the movement — a possibility deeply compromised if Indian authorities consider him a foreign agent.

“What Tibetans must address is the idea that Tibetans could be considered a security threat to India and not an asset,” said Tsering Shakya, a leading Tibet specialist. “But the idea that a boy at the age of 14 was selected as a covert agent by a foreign government to destabilize India — and the assumption the boy will assume leadership of the Tibetan movement and eventually work against India — is worthy of a cheap spy novel.”

A cheap spy novel? C'mon, if it could hapen in the United States it could happen there. Would a birth certificate help?

Kids these days! A clever use of functional MRI technology coupled with video games indicates that teenagers just have to show off for their friends:

To test how the presence of peers influences risk taking, the researchers asked 14 young teenagers (ages 14 to 18), 14 college students and 12 young adults to play a six-minute video driving game while in a brain scanner. Participants were given cash prizes for completing the game in a certain time, but players had to make decisions about stopping at yellow lights, and being delayed, or racing through yellow lights, which could result in a faster time and a bigger prize, but also meant a higher risk for crashing and an even longer delay. The children and adults played four rounds of the game while undergoing the brain scan. Half the time they played alone, and half the time they were told that two same-sex friends who had accompanied them to the study were watching the play in the next room.

Among adults and college students, there were no meaningful differences in risk taking, regardless of whether friends were watching. But the young teenagers ran about 40 percent more yellow lights and had 60 percent more crashes when they knew their friends were watching. And notably, the regions of the brain associated with reward showed greater activity when they were playing in view of their friends. It was as if the presence of friends, even in the next room, prompted the brain’s reward system to drown out any warning signals about risk, tipping the balance toward the reward.

And a key point - it is not as if the friends were cheering and exhorting the driver to go for it:

Dr. Steinberg notes that the findings give a new view of peer pressure, since the peers in this experiment were not even in the same room as the teenager in the scanner.

“The subject was in the scanner, so the friends were not able to directly pressure the person to take chances,” Dr. Steinberg said. “I think it’s helpful to understand because many parents conceive of peer pressure as kids directly coercing each other into doing things. We’ve shown that just the knowledge that your friends are watching you can increase risky behavior.”

I suppose this is one of many reasons the military recruits eighteen year olds rather than twenty-eight year olds.

February 07, 2011

SAN ANTONIO — Some of the world’s pre-eminent experts on bias discovered an unexpected form of it at their annual meeting.

Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this year’s meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new “outgroup.”

It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”

The obvious alternative - being black or female is a fact of biology; conservatism is a belief set, and it is wrong.

OK, the notion that either conservatism or libealism can be objectively verified strikes me as an absurdly long stretch, but I am not an earnest lib professor rationalizing my close-mindedness.

Back to the Times:

The fields of psychology, sociology and anthropology have long attracted liberals, but they became more exclusive after the 1960s, according to Dr. Haidt. “The fight for civil rights and against racism became the sacred cause unifying the left throughout American society, and within the academy,” he said, arguing that this shared morality both “binds and blinds.”

“If a group circles around sacred values, they will evolve into a tribal-moral community,” he said. “They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value.” It’s easy for social scientists to observe this process in other communities, like the fundamentalist Christians who embrace “intelligent design” while rejecting Darwinism. But academics can be selective, too, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan found in 1965 when he warned about the rise of unmarried parenthood and welfare dependency among blacks — violating the taboo against criticizing victims of racism.

“Moynihan was shunned by many of his colleagues at Harvard as racist,” Dr. Haidt said. “Open-minded inquiry into the problems of the black family was shut down for decades, precisely the decades in which it was most urgently needed. Only in the last few years have liberal sociologists begun to acknowledge that Moynihan was right all along.”

Similarly, Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, was ostracized in 2005 for wondering publicly whether the preponderance of male professors in some top math and science departments might be due partly to the larger variance in I.Q. scores among men (meaning there are more men at the very high and very low ends). “This was not a permissible hypothesis,” Dr. Haidt said. “It blamed the victims rather than the powerful. The outrage ultimately led to his resignation. We psychologists should have been outraged by the outrage. We should have defended his right to think freely.”

The Social Intuitionist Model has been extended into "Moral Foundations Theory," an account of how five innate psychological systems form the foundation of “intuitive ethics,” but each culture constructs its own sets of virtues on top of these foundations. The current American culture war can be seen as arising from the fact that Liberals try to create a morality using only the Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity modules; conservatives, especially religious conservatives, use all five modules, including Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. (The theory owes a great deal to Richard Shweder's account of the "Big 3" moral ethics: Autonomy, Community, and Divinity). To see how I have applied moral psychology to the study of politics, click here.

And his WSJ essay on the motivations of the Tea Partiers is fascinating. Briefly, conservatives think that what goes around ought to come around; liberals think goverment should stand at the ready to be sure it doesn't:

The rank-and-file tea partiers think that liberals turned America upside down in the 1960s and 1970s, and they want to reverse many of those changes. They are patriotic and religious, and they want to see those values woven into their children's education. Above all, they want to live in a country in which hard work and personal responsibility pay off and laziness, cheating and irresponsibility bring people to ruin. Give them liberty, sure, but more than that: Give them karma.

February 06, 2011

Team Obama delivers another 'WTF' moment in Egypt, with Hillary Clinton saying Mubarak needs to go and the US special envoy saying his "continued leadership is critical". The Times papers this over as best they can:

The latest challenge came Saturday afternoon when the man sent last weekend by President Obama to persuade the 82-year-old leader to step out of the way, Frank G. Wisner, told a group of diplomats and security experts that “President Mubarak’s continued leadership is critical — it’s his opportunity to write his own legacy.”

But just before his remarks, Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton gave a strategy overview that stood at odds with that assessment. At a minimum, she said, Mr. Mubarak must move out of the way so that his vice president, Omar Suleiman, can engage in talks with protest leaders over everything from constitutional changes to free and fair elections.

It is hardly the first time the Obama administration has seemed uncertain on its feet during the Egyptian crisis, as it struggles to stay on the right side of history and to avoid accelerating a revolution that could spin out of control.

The mixed messages have been confusing and at times embarrassing — a reflection of a policy that, by necessity, has been made up on the fly. “This is what happens when you get caught by surprise,” said one American official, who would not speak on the record. “We’ve had endless strategy sessions for the past two years on Mideast peace, on containing Iran. And how many of them factored in the possibility that Egypt,” and presumably whatever dominoes follow it, “moves from stability to turmoil? None.”

This is what hapens when you get caught by surprise? For heaven's sake - this is what happens when too many people are talking to the press instead of to each other. I am highly confident that if the adversary were Sarah Palain or Mitch McConnell the mesage coordination would be airtight.

The Times engages in a bit more damage control here:

Just hours before offering her correctives of Mr. Wisner, Mrs. Clinton made the case at a gathering in Munich that the entire process would take time, and must be carefully managed. “Revolutions have overthrown dictators in the name of democracy,” she reminded her audience, “only to see the process hijacked by new autocrats who use violence, deception and rigged elections to stay in power.”

I think it's important to support the transition process announced by the Egyptian Government, actually headed by now Vice President Omar Suleiman...

Tea leaf readers might have considered that to be a clue as to her view on Mubarak's ongoing role. Here is another (my emphasis):

And at this point, where President Mubarak has announced he will not stand for reelection, nor will his son, where he has given a clear message to his government to lead and support this process of transition...

If I were to parse this diplo-speak, I would read it to mean that she believes that Mubarak has (or ought to) instruct his goverment to negotiate, not negotiate himself.

Well. There is no doubt that Clinton and her special envoy were not on the same page. The only issue is, why couldn't Obama and Clinton communicate the message to their own special envoy that the page had been turned?

Per the WaPo, Ms. Clinton's coded message was heard but not welcomed in Egypt:

"If the message coming now from Washington is that Mubarak can continue and his head of intelligence will lead the change, this will send the completely wrong message to the Egyptian people," ElBaradei said in an interview Saturday night. Suleiman served as Mubarak's intelligence chief for two decades before being named vice president as the crisis unfolded last week.

...In her remarks in Munich, Clinton called on the government to take further steps. But she also warned that if the transition is not carried out in an orderly, deliberate way, there are forces "that will try to derail or overtake the process, to pursue their own specific agenda" - an apparent reference to the Muslim Brotherhood - "which is why I think it's important to support the transition process announced by the Egyptian government, actually headed now by Vice President Omar Suleiman."

"President Mubarak remains utterly critical in the days ahead as we sort our way toward the future," Wisner told the Munich conference via video link from New York.

A senior administration official expressed chagrin at Wisner's comments, which he said were "self-evidently divergent from our public message" and "not coordinated with the United States" government. "He's a delightful man," the official said. "But he's doing his own thing."